UCMP was well represented at the 9th North American Paleontological Convention (NAPC) held at the University of Cincinnati, June 21–26, this summer. In particular, an all-day symposium, Through the End of the Cretaceous in the Type Locality of the Hell Creek Formation in Montana and Adjacent Areas, provided a venue for presenting and celebrating over three decades of collaborative field work and research by UCMP paleontologists, graduate students and colleagues. The session was co-convened by Bill Clemens and his former graduate student Greg Wilson, with longtime colleagues Jack Horner (Montana State University, Museum of the Rockies) and Joseph Hartman (University of North Dakota). The symposium presentations will be featured in a Geological Society of America Special Paper/Hell Creek Volume, edited by Hartman, Wilson, Horner and Clemens. Among the UCMP highlights, Bill Clemens provided a historical review of the studies that have taken place in the Hell Creek Formation; Kaitlin Maguire discussed the paleoecology of a Maastrichtian microvertebrate site in Montana; Pat Holroyd, Greg and J. Howard Hutchison presented on turtle diversity through the latest Cretaceous; Mark Goodwin and Jack Horner gave talks on the abundance of Tyrannosaurus in the Hell Creek and the fossil record of Triceratops; former graduate student Anna Thompson coauthored a paper with Nan Arens (former UCMP faculty curator) and Hope Jahren on the vegetation indicators of environmental stress that preceded the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary; and Greg Wilson discussed the mammalian faunal dynamics leading up to and across the K/T boundary.

Beyond the Hell Creek, other UCMP presentations included: Jere Lipps on how reefs through time are photosynthetically driven, integrated ecosystems; Susumu Tomiya on mammalian carnivore evolution in the middle Eocene; Sara Werning on new quantitative methods to assess the optimal location at which to sample long bones for histological study and growth estimation; and Jenny McGuire on her research on distinguishing between fossil voles and their range shifts in Northern California throughout the Quaternary. On the education and outreach side, Judy Scotchmoor gave a talk on using paleontology in the classroom and co-convened a symposium with Keith Miller (Kansas State University) on the Nature of Science and Public Science at which she presented the new Understanding Science website.